Chrome Valley
Poems
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Chrome Valley
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Narrated by:
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Mahogany L. Browne
About this listen
"Browne’s narration of her work is masterful, capturing a range of emotion through inflection, cadence, and volume. It’s an unfettered celebration of Black resilience that will leave listeners satisfied, yet eager to hear more from this gifted poet." - Library Journal, Starred Review
From Lincoln Center’s inaugural poet-in-residence comes this unflinching collection that intricately mines the experience of being a Black woman in America.
A highly anticipated volume from critically acclaimed poet Mahogany L. Browne, Chrome Valley is at once a luminous hymn and a battle cry. Spanning the course of her own life as well as embodying centuries of virulent history, this collection pays solemn tribute to the women who came before her. Musically effervescent yet cutting poems capture the peculiar joys and pangs of Black girlhood: “you ain’t had freedom / ’til you climb on a bus 62 / & head to the closet mall / for a girl fight”; while others explore the inherent grief of motherhood, rhythmically intoning names like the tolling of a church bell: “Because Lesley McSpadden / Because Mamie Till / Because a Black mother know ain’t no song for that empty in ya belly.” Transcendent and grounded, funny and furious, the poems within bring depth to a movement, announcing Mahogany L. Browne as one of the most important poetic voices of our time.
©2023 Mahogany L. Browne (P)2023 Spotify AudiobooksListeners also enjoyed...
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-
Story4.5 out of 5 stars 35
Evoking Beyoncé’s Lemonade for a teen audience, these authors who are truly Octavia Butler’s heirs have woven worlds to create a stunning narrative that puts Black women and gender-nonconforming individuals at its center. A Phoenix First Must Burn will take you on a journey from folktales retold to futuristic societies and everything in between. Filled with stories of love and betrayal, strength and resistance, this collection contains an array of complex and true-to-life characters through which you cannot help but see yourself reflected.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Absolutely brilliant
- By Ruthi on 03-11-20
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Nowhere is a Place
- By: Bernice McFadden
- Narrated by: Robin Miles
- Length: 9 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 335
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 298
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Story4 out of 5 stars 304
Nothing can mend a broken heart quite like family. Sherry has struggled all her life to understand who she is, where she comes from, and, most important, why her mother slapped her cheek one summer afternoon. The incident has haunted Sherry, and it causes her to dig into her family's past. Like many family histories, it is fractured and stubbornly reluctant to reveal its secrets. But Sherry is determined to know the full story. In a few days' time, her extended family will gather for a reunion, and Sherry sets off across the country with her mother, Dumpling, to join them.
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5 out of 5 stars
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A Mother and Daughter Tear. It. Up.
- By Susie on 01-15-14
By: Bernice McFadden
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Above Us Only Sky
- By: Michele Young-Stone
- Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell
- Length: 9 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 81
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 73
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Story4 out of 5 stars 75
Prudence Eleanor Vilkas was born with a pair of wings molded to her back. Considered a birth defect, her wings were surgically removed, leaving only the ghost of them behind. Growing up in Los Vientos, Florida, Prudence meets her long-estranged Lithuanian grandfather and discovers a miraculous lineage beating and pulsing with past Lithuanian bird-women.
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4 out of 5 stars
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I'm So Glad I Listened to It!
- By Elizabeth on 08-22-16
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Glorious
- By: Bernice L. McFadden
- Narrated by: Alfre Woodard
- Length: 5 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 255
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 190
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Story4 out of 5 stars 188
Glorious is set against the backdrops of the Jim Crow South, the Harlem Renaissance, and the civil rights era. Blending the truth of American history with the fruits of Bernice L. McFadden's rich imagination, this is the story of Easter Venetta Bartlett, a fictional Harlem Renaissance writer whose tumultuous path to success, ruin, and revival offers a candid portrait of the American experience in all its beauty and cruelty.
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3 out of 5 stars
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Gruesome violence
- By Marilyn on 11-22-11
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New American Best Friend
- By: Olivia Gatwood
- Narrated by: Olivia Gatwood
- Length: 54 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 17
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 14
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Story5 out of 5 stars 13
One of the most recognizable young poets in America, Olivia Gatwood dazzles with her tribute to contemporary American womanhood in her debut book, New American Best Friend. Gatwood's poems deftly deconstruct traditional stereotypes. The focus shifts from childhood to adulthood, gender to sexuality, violence to joy. And always and inexorably, the book moves toward celebration, culminating in a series of odes: odes to the body, to tough women, to embracing your own journey in all its failures and triumphs.
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3 out of 5 stars
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Amazing poetry, but the music
- By Keaira on 07-29-19
By: Olivia Gatwood
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Other Voices, Other Rooms
- By: Truman Capote
- Narrated by: Cody Roberts
- Length: 6 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 147
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 129
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Story4 out of 5 stars 130
At the age of 12, Joel Knox is summoned to meet the father who abandoned him at birth. But when Joel arrives at the decaying mansion in Skully's Landing, his father is nowhere in sight. What he finds instead is a sullen stepmother who delights in killing birds; an uncle with the face - and heart - of a debauched child; and a fearsome little girl named Idabel who may offer him the closest thing he has ever known to love.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Capote’s coming of age story
- By Daniel Diffin on 11-08-23
By: Truman Capote
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Arcadia
- By: Lauren Groff
- Narrated by: Andrew Garman
- Length: 11 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 375
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 325
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Story4 out of 5 stars 323
Lauren Groff’s acclaimed debut novel The Monsters of Templeton was short-listed for the Orange Prize. Her second novel, Arcadia opens in the late 1960s with a group of young idealists forming a commune in western New York State. Into this group is born Bit, who grows into a quiet, distant man. Over the course of 50 years, Bit witnesses the utopia crumble and the world change in unimaginable ways.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Luscious prose, intimate and realistic
- By Kathleen on 03-22-12
By: Lauren Groff
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Priestdaddy
- A Memoir
- By: Patricia Lockwood
- Narrated by: Patricia Lockwood
- Length: 10 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 949
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 856
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Story4 out of 5 stars 854
Father Greg Lockwood is unlike any Catholic priest you have ever met - a man who lounges in boxer shorts, who loves action movies, and whose constant jamming on the guitar reverberates "like a whole band dying in a plane crash in 1972". His daughter is an irreverent poet who long ago left the church's country. When an unexpected crisis leads her and her husband to move back into her parents' rectory, their two worlds collide.
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3 out of 5 stars
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Terrible narration--read, don't listen
- By Penelope on 08-06-17
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The Hollow Ground
- By: Natalie S. Harnett
- Narrated by: Luci Christian
- Length: 10 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 534
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 469
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Story4 out of 5 stars 472
The underground mine fires ravaging Pennsylvania coal country have forced 11-year-old Brigid Howley and her family to seek refuge with her estranged grandparents, the formidable Gram and the black lung-stricken Gramp. Tragedy is no stranger to the Howleys, a proud Irish-American clan who takes strange pleasure in the "curse" laid upon them generations earlier by a priest who ran afoul of the Molly Maguires. The weight of this legacy rests heavily on a new generation, when Brigid, already struggling to keep her family together, makes a grisly discovery in a long-abandoned bootleg mine shaft.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Disfunction makes a good read
- By NHull on 05-30-14
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Bone
- By: Yrsa Daley-Ward, Kiese Laymon - foreword
- Narrated by: Yrsa Daley-Ward, Kiese Laymon
- Length: 1 hr and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 26
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 25
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 25
From navigating the oft competing worlds of religion and desire, to balancing society’s expectations with the raw experience of being a woman in the world; from detailing the experiences of growing up as a first generation black British woman, to working through situations of dependence and abuse; from finding solace in the echoing caverns of depression and loss, to exploring the vulnerability and redemption in falling in love, each of the raw and immediate poems in Daley-Ward’s bone resonates to the core of what it means to be human.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Visceral,blood hot, thrilling poetry-prose
- By Pam on 12-28-22
By: Yrsa Daley-Ward, and others
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Paradise
- By: Toni Morrison
- Narrated by: Toni Morrison
- Length: 15 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 247
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 212
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 209
In Paradise - her first novel since she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature - Toni Morrison gives us a bravura performance. As the book begins deep in Oklahoma early one morning in 1976, nine men from Ruby (pop. 360), in defense of "the one all-black town worth the pain", assault the nearby Convent and the women in it. From the town's ancestral origins in 1890 to the fateful day of the assault, Paradise tells the story of a people ever mindful of the relationship between their spectacular history and a void.
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5 out of 5 stars
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MORRISON AT HER MOST COMPLEX
- By Kennedi Hill on 11-07-19
By: Toni Morrison
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Her Body and Other Parties
- Stories
- By: Carmen Maria Machado
- Narrated by: Amy Landon
- Length: 8 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall3.5 out of 5 stars 633
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 544
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Story3.5 out of 5 stars 551
In Her Body and Other Parties, Carmen Maria Machado blithely demolishes the arbitrary borders between psychological realism and science fiction, comedy and horror, fantasy and fabulism. While her work has earned her comparisons to Karen Russell and Kelly Link, she has a voice that is all her own. In this electric and provocative debut, Machado bends genre to shape startling narratives that map the realities of women's lives and the violence visited upon their bodies.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Beautiful
- By Anonymous User on 11-17-17
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Tristessa
- By: Jack Kerouac
- Narrated by: Mike Dennis
- Length: 2 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 52
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 44
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 43
In 1955, novelist Jack Kerouac detoured from his cross-country American travels to Mexico City, where a group of junkie expatriates he had known from the New York City post-war scene had gone for the cheap and plentiful supply of heroin and morphine. Fellow beat writer William S. Burroughs, who had been a part of the Mexican expatriate community, had introduced Kerouac to Bill Garver (named Old Bull Gaines in the novel), a much-older, long-term addict who had in turn introduced Kerouac to Esperanza Villanueva, whom Kerouac named Tristessa in the novel.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Gritty
- By William on 06-09-18
By: Jack Kerouac
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Magical Negro
- Poems
- By: Morgan Parker
- Narrated by: Morgan Parker
- Length: 1 hr and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 49
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 47
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 47
Magical Negro is an archive of black everydayness, a catalog of contemporary folk heroes, an ethnography of ancestral grief, and an inventory of figureheads, idioms, and customs. These American poems are both elegy and jive, joke and declaration, songs of congregation and self-conception. Focused primarily on depictions of black womanhood alongside personal narratives, the collection tackles interior and exterior politics - of both the body and society, of both the individual and the collective experience.
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1 out of 5 stars
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Waste of time
- By Lida on 07-19-20
By: Morgan Parker
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Island of a Thousand Mirrors
- By: Nayomi Munaweera
- Narrated by: Priya Ayyar
- Length: 7 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 110
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 101
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 101
Yasodhara tells the story of her own Sinhala family, rich in love, with everything they could ask for. As a child in idyllic Colombo, social hierarchies, their parents’ ambitions, teenage love shape Yasodhara and her siblings’ lives, and, subtly, the differences between Tamil and Sinhala people; but the peace is shattered by the tragedies of war. Yasodhara's family escapes to Los Angeles. But Yasodhara's life has already become intertwined with a young Tamil girl's.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Pronunciation
- By Mahidevran on 04-07-18
By: Nayomi Munaweera
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The Star Side of Bird Hill
- By: Naomi Jackson
- Narrated by: Robin Miles
- Length: 7 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 90
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 82
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Story4 out of 5 stars 82
Two sisters, ages 10 and 16, are exiled from Brooklyn to Bird Hill in Barbados, after their mother can no longer care for them. The young Phaedra and her older sister, Dionne, live, for the summer of 1989, with their grandmother, Hyacinth, a midwife and practitioner of the local spiritual practice of obeah. Dionne spends the summer in search of love, testing her grandmother's limits, and wanting to go home. Phaedra explores Bird Hill, where her family has lived for generations.
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5 out of 5 stars
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My absolute favorite book of all time
- By Eme on 07-16-15
By: Naomi Jackson